“... incorporating, as it were, the back half of Beaumont, who otherwise appears in the novel as Thomas de Blacqueville, Olivier’s best friend, bumped off in a duel before Olivier has even embarked for the New World. By grafting Beaumont onto Garmont and Tocqueville onto Blacqueville, Carey establishes the rules of his creative game and signs over to ...”

“... toying (‘O Who is trying to shield Whom?/Who left a hairpin in the room?’), but often it’s a more unnerving collision and collusion of worlds:The glacier knocks in the cupboard,The desert sighs in the bed,And the crack in the tea-cup opensA lane to the land of the dead.These vistas owe something to Auden’s first love, ...”

“... not expected to believe that James I had actually been raised to heaven by pink-limbed angels, any more than imperial Romans were expected to believe that their dead emperors actually became gods. The case is different, however, for religious images such as depictions of the Assumption of Mary. The Assumption is a post-biblical tradition. (It is called an ...”

“... from the Order of Odd Fellows, buying the rest later for £150. When his growing family needed more space, and television versions of his books provided the means, he bought a timber-framed Tudor house (due to be demolished) for a pound, disassembled it and moved it eighteen miles to sit next to the hall. The cover of Powsels and Thrums shows an image by ...”

“... one of their later outings, Catrine begins a canvas in dull browns, in the style, she declares, of Thomas Cole, who he’d told her not to like: but she has decided to be contrary. Clearly, Catrine doesn’t want to be seen as just another girl. Can’t the teacher reck his own rede? At one point, Gilbert, treading on thin ice, begins to say she reminds him of ...”

“... done as much for McGahern, who mentions him in a letter to a friend as ‘the one I dealt with, more interested in machine guns than in coffins’. In the novel, when McKiernan asks, ‘You don’t seem to have any interest in our cause?’ Ruttledge replies: ‘No. I don’t like violence.’ It is tempting to read the argument about Northern Ireland that ...”

“... After the bus had passed, the police made concentrated efforts to clear the area, bringing in more officers, including Special Patrol Group officers in vans. Some protesters tried to escape by heading down side streets. Most of these led the demonstrators away from trouble, but Beachcroft Avenue, a narrow residential road, just led onto another ...”

“... and for me to study his cuff buttons. I found it hard to see the man inside the clothes; and like Thomas Cromwell in my novels, I couldn’t help winding the fabric back onto the bolt and pricing him by the yard. At this ceremony, which was formal and carefully orchestrated, the prince gave an award to a young author who came up on stage in shirtsleeves to ...”

“... on from there to Mytilenean chit-chat. B. and I weren’t yet together – wouldn’t be for five more years – but I was jealous nonetheless when she described the encounter in an email. Blast that Souhami! Not only was she the author of a series of stylish biographies of Rich and Famous Lesbians – Stein and Toklas, Violet Trefusis, Radclyffe Hall, the ...”

“... an instant classic. The second, the masterpiece, has the same characters in it, is much longer and more complicated, and increasingly interested in myth and language games. The third is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course. Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.A ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst​ ’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation both sexual and otherwise, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentences – this is only the beginning of a list ...”

“... They invent the scenes through which they move, and thus invent themselves afresh on every page. More than most fictional heroes, the hero in Hamsun writes the novel we read, plots it for us. Yet, like escaped convicts, these heroes erase their tracks as they proceed, and this seems to be hapless rather than willed: they carry no continuous memory of what ...”

“... poem in couplets, of the Byzantine times, that I have,’ and what must he have felt, even more apprehensively, when he received the manuscript – was it ‘The Story of Eudocia’? Wearily he sat down, when he had no energy even for his own work, to write a critique of Dixon’s uninspired couplets, on and on. As usual, Hopkins begins his critique ...”

“... either to purgatory or to eternal punishment in hell. No one believes in eternal punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently ...”

“... between ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’ (line 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond ...”